Friday, December 23, 2016

Should auld contestants be forgot, and never brought to mind?A few Conservative leadership candidates might be asking themselves this question on New Year's Eve.That's because the first deadline in the Conservative leadership race looms on Dec. 31, when contestants who have already launched their campaigns have to pay the party a $50,000 compliance deposit in order to stay in the running.You can read the rest of this article here.

It's a ranked ballot from what I understand. I suppose one could pick 1-14. The 338 constituencies in the Commons are worth 100 points each for a total of 33,800 points. Points are awarded based on proportional representation: If candidate X wins 50% of the votes in constituency Y he or she will garner 50 points. The process continues until one candidate receives 50%+1 of points allotted.

Hopefully they use Scantron sheets where we fill in bubbles and the machines can automatically count our 2nd, 3rd, etc. choices. In 2004 we did manual counts but there were only three candidates so there would never have been more than two counts. With 13 or 14 candidates manual counts would take all night!

Does anybody know where we can get full results of the 2004 Conservative leadership vote? I remember the 100 point system being controversial in 2004 due to some Quebec ridings casting less than 10 votes, but I can't find the full data. Wikipedia only has a riding-by-riding breakdown of the point totals, not the votes, but as Stronach won only 34% of the points with only 22% of the votes, there must have been quite a few ridings where she racked up a lot of points with a handful of votes.

Thanks Ronald. Now that I think about it, the CPC probably didn't publish riding-by-riding vote counts. But I definitely remember reading in the papers at the time that one Quebec riding cast only 7 votes - it might have been Hochelaga, where Stronach won all 100 points.

That's obviously not going to repeat itself in 2017 as the CPC actually has a real Quebec wing now. But it does show the weakness of that voting system -- if a political party does not have active riding associations across the country, then "rotten boroughs" could potentially determine the outcome. (This was also possible in the bad old days of delegated leadership conventions, but at least the riding representatives for "rotten boroughs" had to make the effort to show up to the convention.)

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